Printers

Most printers are departmental printers, owned by some department and are meant to be used only by people belonging to that department. The department has purchased the printer and is responsible for paper, supplies and maintenance.

There are also printers that can be used by everybody. These printers are generally maintained by C&CZ, but also the department Grafische Vormgeving has printers (up to A0 size) that can be used. In case of problems or complaints about the C&CZ-managed printers, contact C&CZ.

When using Adobe Acrobat version 8 the PostScript driver generates code which often produces an unrecoverable error on the printers mentioned above.

Postscript color printers

name

location

merk/type

Special

weber

HG00.011

Ricoh Aficio MP C2500

Duplex, A3, scanning and copying possible

pascal

HG01.089

Ricoh Aficio MP C2500

Duplex, A3, scanning and copying possible

ohm

HG02.002

Ricoh Aficio MP C2500

Duplex, A3, scanning and copying possible

kelvin

HG02.089

Ricoh Aficio MP C2500

Duplex, A3, scanning and copying possible

vermeer

HG03.002

HP Color LaserJet 9500HDN

Duplex, A3 and transparancies possible

miro

HG03.089

Xerox Phaser 7300DX

Duplex and A3 possible

nicolas

HG03.089

HP Business Inkjet 2250TN

Only transparancies (A4)

The printers that are capable of duplex (double sided) printing, wil print all documents double sided, except documents that are explicitly marked as being single sided.

General remarks/warnings

Do not make lots of copies without testing in advance

Sometimes a print is not want you intended: color instead of black&white, A4 instead of A3 or vice versa, single instead of double sided or vice versa, stripes or unclear prints, etc. Afterwards you can often tell what went wrong, but sometimes even that is not possible. Conclusion: if you want to make lots of copies, first print only one copy. If that produces want you intended, print the rest on the same printer.

Do not use Adobe Acrobat 8 to print to an HP4250/4350 printer

Printing from Acrobat version 8 to an HP 4250/4350 printer with the standard PostScript driver will often result in a printer error that can only be solved by switching the printer off and back on. Using the PCL driver, this does not happen, but this driver uses a lot of resources of the server (printer-srv) which results in printing or even displaying printer properties becoming unusably sluggish.

Some possibilities for printing PDF:

Send the print job to a Ricoh or Xerox printer instead of an HP printer.

Use Foxit Reader instead of Acrobat Reader. On managed Windows PCs Foxit Reader can be found on the S-disk.

Do not use a color printer for black&white prints of a color file

Printing in black&white on a color printer can produce color. The most frequent (but not the only!) problems are:

'lpr -Zg' only works if the file does not contain any printer settings. If it is made by a printer driver (using 'print to file'), then the driver settings take priority.

So if you want to be sure that something is printed in black&white (and you want to pay the black&white price), always use a printer that can only print in black&white.

Printing using Windows

Windows 7

This is a workaround for Windows 7 (32bit and 64bit).

First connect a network drive from the printerserver, an error message will be displayed if there is something wrong with your logonname or password.Only connecting the printer, not using this network drive, often does not display this error message.

Connecting a network drive can be accomplished in 'Windows Explorer'.

Click 'Start' -> 'Computer' to start Windows Explorer.

In the menubar click 'Tools' -> 'Map Network Drive...'.

Select a 'Drive:' letter and enter \\printer-srv.science.ru.nl\printerdrivers in the 'Folder:' field.

Check 'Reconnect at logon' if you want to use the printer on a regular basis.

Check 'Connect using different credentials' when your PC logonname and password does not match your science account.A logonname/password dialog will later appear. Provide your science loginname and password.

Enter the name in 'Printer name', click 'Next'. The driver will install.

Click 'Do not share this printer', click 'Next' and finally 'Finish'.

At this point you have installed a local printer. Now we need to change the 'Printer Port' to access the printer on the network.

Click 'Start' -> 'Devices and Printers' and right click the installed printer.

Select 'Printer properties'.

In the Properties window select the tab 'Ports'. Click 'Add Port...',

Select 'Local Port', click 'New Port...'.

Enter '\\printer-srv.science.ru.nl\printername' in the text field.

Click several times 'Ok' or 'Close'.

You should be able to print.

Windows2000/XP

First connect a network drive from the printer-server, this will show errors if there is something wrong with your login or password. Connecting this network drive can be accomplished in a 'Windows Explorer' window like 'My Documents'. Click on 'Tools' -> 'Map Network Drive...' and choose for the 'Folder:' \\printer-srv\printerdrivers.
Then you can add a new printer using 'Start' -> 'Settings' -> 'Printers and Faxes', select the pinter task 'Add a printer'. Choose 'A network printer ...', choose 'Connect to this printer ...' and type \\printer-srv\printernaam in the 'Name:' field, for example \\printer-srv\jansteen. Now you can select to make it the default printer. Finally click 'Finish'.

If you manage your PC or laptop yourself, the most simple solution is to create an account name and password identical to your FNWI account. Then Windows will automatically use the correct account name and password. An other solution would be to connect to the printer using 'Connect using a different user name'.

Now click several times on 'Next', select 'Default Printer' as needed and deselect 'Would you like to print a test page'. You can change the settings of the printer in de tabs you get when selecting 'Properties'.

For departmental printers it is usually necessary to select the brand en model of the printer, except when C&CZ has added the printer to the Samba list of printerdefinitions (/usr/local/samba/lib/printers.def).

Printing using a Managed Linux PC

With kprinter you can choose your default printer ("Set as Default"). Deselect under System Options that every application should use the last selected printer ("defaults to the last printer used in the application"). To print to a budgetted printer, you need a Kerberos ticket. If your home directory comes from a server which demands NFS4 with Kerberos (e.g. pile and bundle), you should already have a valid Kerberos ticket. The command klist shows your Kerberos tickets and with the command kinit you can get or renew a Kerberos ticket. A managed Linux PC with cups 1.2 (Fedora 7) cannot use Kerberos tickets. On those PCs have have to type your password every time to print to a budgetted printer.

To show a printer queueu, use lpq. All other ways, like the graphical application, always show an empty queue.

The print system for Linux machines differs a lot from the Sun machines, but the warning mentioned for Sun machines
also holds for the Linux machines.

Printing using other Linux machines

In linux one can choose to print the same way Windows-machines do, through SMB to a Samba-server.

As device URI, type smb://username:password@printer-srv.science.ru.nl/printername, where you have to fill in your own username and password and must use the offical name of the printer in printername.

The package smbclient is required in order to use a Samba-printer. For Debian linux, check out this link.

Detailed instructions for openSuSE 11

Ask C&CZ to give your PC a permanent IP addres and name.

Ask the owner of the printbudget to add your "login" name to the list of users that is allowed to use the printer. This can be done by the printbudget owner using http://dhz.science.ru.nl, choose "printing". However: only C&CZ can give permission to print from a computer that is not in the list of "C&CZ trusted" machines. For this purpose C&CZ has to give the command: "printbudget -g budgetname -m +user@host".

Back in the "Printer Configurations" menu click "Print Test Page" (select two pages to test double sided printing). Warning: if you are still "root" the printqueue may not accept these test pages.

Printing using a MacOS machine

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion)

[en]

Open “System Preferences”, select “Print & Fax”

Press the ”+” button, it will open the “Printer Browser”

Click in the Toolbar on "Advanced" (if unavailable: right click on the menu en choose "Customize Toolbar... ", drag the "Advanced" icon into the Toolbar)

Enter requested data:

Type: Windows

URL: smb://printer-srv.science.ru.nl/printernaam

Name and location: make your own choice. Select the (precise) printer model.

Click “Add”.

When printing your first job the printer will show some error message. Click on 'Resume'. A dialog requesting credentials will appear. Provide your science account and password. You could add these credentials to your 'Key Ring'.

and you’re done!

Note: It may be necessary to supply your username and password in the URL, as explained below for MacOS 10.5.

OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Open “System Preferences”, select “Print & Fax”

Press the ”+” button, it will open the “Printer Browser”

Click in the Toolbar on "Advanced" (if unavailable: right click on the menu en choose "Customize Toolbar... ", drag the "Advanced" icon into the Toolbar)

Enter requested data:

Type: Windows

URL: smb://loginnaam:wachtwoord@printer-srv.science.ru.nl/printernaam

Name and location: make your own choice. Select, if you desire, the precise printer model.

Printing using a Sun machine

The online manual man lpr describes all options of the lpr command. These options are only applicable to text- en DVI- and for PostScript documents which have no explicit printer dependencies.

Whenever documents are created on a PC, then the options in the document - options that where set in the printerdriver at the time of printing - always have precedence over the lpr-options. The lpr-options also have no influence when printing PCL or PDF documents.

Beware: This implies that printing, using the lpr -Zg document.ext can result in unexpected, 'expensive' color pages.

Some examples for the printer vermeer:

Command

Description

lpr -Pvermeer report.dvi

A4, double sided

lpr -Pvermeer -gsigma report.dvi

A4, double sided, of budget "sigma"

lpr -Pvermeer -Zs report.dvi

A4, single sided

lpr -Pvermeer -Zs,c=10 report.dvi

A4, single sided, 10 copies

lpr -Pvermeer -Za3 cola.ps

A3 (and single sided)

lpr -Pvermeer -Zf cola.ps

Transparancy (and single sided :-)

Costs

Use of the line printer is free. All other printers you have to pay per page. The costs of a printjob (number of pages * page price) are automatically deducted from your budget. You need to have a (positive) budget.

Beware: if there is just one single color pixel on a page, the printer will register a color page and your budget will be charged for color.

name

price per page

Special

all PostScript laserprinters

€ 0,035

A4 black&white

all PostScript color laserprinters

€ 0,23

A4 color

all PostScript color laserprinters

€ 0,495

transparancy black/white

all PostScript color laserprinters

€ 0,69

transparancy color

all PostScript color laserprinters

€ 0,16

A3 black/white

all PostScript color laserprinters

€ 0,55

A3 color

nicolas

€ 1,40

always transparancy

Medio 2005 the page prices were recalculated and determined. Rules used in calculation: 1) C&CZ does not
make a profit from printing, 2) page prices are the same on all printers and 3) all costs (initial purchase, maintenance, paper, supplies, headerpages) are included in the calculation. The price for a black&white page is based on the costs for pages printed by a black&white laserprinter like the HP4350DN. De surplus costs of the more expensive color laserprinters like the HP9500HDN are included in the price of a color page.

Binding, cutting, stapling, ...

In the Faculty Library you can buy binders for your reports, etc. Also there is a cutting tool, a 23 hole punch and several staplers. All Ricoh printers can staple automatically.

Next to the printers "miro/henry/nicolas" (HG03.089) one can also find a cutting tool and a big stapler.

Using different paper types

If you want to print on something other than plain paper (60-81 g/m^2), then you need to specify the paper type. In kprinter you need to select Properties and choose the right paper type. For example if you use 82-105 g/m^2 paper on a Ricoh printer, choose Middle Thick; for 106-253 g/m^2 choose either Thick, Thick 2 or Thick 3 with increasing thickness.

If you don't do this, the printer ink might not stick to the paper well enough, which leads to ink stains on both your documents and the printer itself.

Note: These options are not available when you print using the command line.

Print projects

Cups

Print project Cups
C&CZ project to implement IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) printing.
Targeting Linux and Macintosh computers, to provide a better printing service for budgeted printing.
But this will also make printing to budgeted printers easier for students and employees who administer their own Windows computers.

Peage

Print project Peage
Campus wide printing project to provide uniform budgeted printing, copying and scanning on Radboud University campus, initially for students.
A PoC (Proof of Concept) with ca 100 students started in June, 2010.